The “duck” doesn’t taste much like waterfowl. The “beef”? Not exactly the essence of moo.

Doesn’t matter, at least not to the vegetarians and vegans who line up for the Thursday buffet at Tsing Tao, a Chinese restaurant in a south Boulder strip mall.

They are celebrating! They are standing in line before a steam table, dipping long metal spoons into vats of sauce and protein and ladling it over rice, and none of it contains even a whisper of meat.

Buffets and vegetarians, not to mention vegans, don’t usually get along. Steam tables attract Indian lamb curry, and sliced ham, and chicken enchiladas, and great slabs of meaty lasagna. The vegetarian could take a chance with, for example, a little stir-fried broccoli, but there’s the dark sauce. Chicken broth? Probably.

The sauce is not a concern at Tsing Tao. The duck, the pork, the chicken, even the fish — not a problem. All of it is made from soybeans. Texturally, the stuff is meaty.

Conceptually, at least, this is truly dreamy for vegans and vegetarians, for whom buffets represent mixtures of longing and revulsion.

The vegetarian examines a long row of dishes beneath angled sneeze-guards and thinks: “Imagine piling your plate with all of the food you want. I haven’t done that since my obsession with Fiona Apple blossomed and I followed her into veganism.”

But then comes the revulsion: “Oy, look at all of that disgusting meat.”

Now, the longing can be satisifed without the stomach-churning.

Veggie-loving diners don’t need to limit their Tsing Tao visits to Thursdays — they can order mock-meat dishes off the menu every day at Tsing Tao, which is cool. But it’s no buffet.

In a state with the fourth-highest rate of youth obesity in the nation, the Baton Rouge parks and recreation agency wanted to lure Louisiana kids away from their screens and into the parks to get moving.